Ford makes strong commitment

Ford's CEO talks like he gets it. Ford did not have too much to show -- they announced they will be moving to Velodyne's new lower cost 32-laser puck-sized LIDAR for their research, and boosting their research fleet to 30 vehicles. They plan for full-auto operation in limited regions fairly soon.

Ford is also making its own efforts into one-way car share (similar to Daimler Car2Go and BMW DriveNow) called GoDrive, which pushes Ford more firmly into the idea of selling rides rather than cars. The car companies are clearly believing this sooner than I expected, and the reason is very clearly the success of Uber. (As I have said, it's a mistake to think of Uber as competition for the taxi companies. Uber is competition for the car companies.)

Ford is also doing an interesting "car swap" product. While details are scant, it seems what the service will do is let you swap your Ford for somebody else's different Ford. For example, if somebody has an F-150 or Transit Van that they know they won't use the cargo features on some day or weekend, you drive over with your ordinary sedan and swap temporarily for their truck -- presumably with a small amount of money flowing to the more popular vehicle. Useful idea.

The big announcement that didn't happen was the much-rumoured alliance between Ford and Google. Ford did not overtly refute it but suggested they had enough partners at present. The alliance would be a good idea, but either the rumours were wrong, or they are waiting for another event (such as the upcoming Detroit Auto Show) to talk about it.

Faraday Future, where art thou?

The big disappointment of the event was the silly concept racecar shown by Faraday Future. Oh, sure, it's a cool electric racecar, but it has absolutely nothing to do with everything we've heard about this company, namely that they are building a consumer electric car-on-demand service with autonomous delivery. Everybody wondered if they had booked the space and did not have their real demo ready on time. It stays secret for a while, it seems. Recent hires, such as Jan Becker, the former head of the autonomous lab for Bosch, suggest they are definitely going autonomous.

Mapping heats up

Google's car drives by having super-detailed maps of all the roads, and that's the correct approach. Google is unlikely to hand out its maps, so both Here/Navteq (now owned by a consortium of auto companies in Germany) and TomTom have efforts to produce similar maps to licence to non-Google robocar teams. They are taking fairly different approaches, which will be the subject of a future article.

One interesting edge is that these companies plan to partner with big automakers and not just give them map data but expect data in return. That means that each company will have a giant fleet of cars constantly scanning the road, and immediately reporting any differences between the map and the territory. With proper scale, they should get reports on changes to the road literally within minutes of them happening. The first car to encounter a change will still need to be able to handle it, possibly by pulling over and/or asking the human passenger to help, but this will be a very rare event.

MobilEye has announced a similar plan, and they are already the camera in a large fraction of advanced cars on the road today. MobilEye has a primary focus on vision, rather than Lidar, but will have lots of sources of data. Tesla has also been uploading data from their cars, though it does not (as far as I know) make as extensive use of detailed maps, though it does rely on general maps.

Lyft announced a $500M investment from GM with $500M more, pushing them to a $5.4B valuation, which is both huge and just a tenth of Uber. This was combined with talk of a push to robocars. (GM will provide a car rental service to Lyft drivers to start, but the speculation is that whatever robocar GM gets involved in will show up at Lyft.)

Yahoo Autos is reporting rumours that Google and Ford will announce a partnership at CES. Google has always said it doesn't want to build the cars, and Ford makes sense as a partner -- big, but with only modest R&D efforts of its own, and frankly a brand that needs a jolt of excitement. That means it will be willing to work with Google as a partner which calls many of the shots, rather than just viewing them as a supplier, which gets to call few of them.

This summer, I started wondering what you might do to build a small farming robot to manage a home garden. I then discovered the interesting Farmbot project, which has been working on this for much longer, and has done much of what I thought might be useful. So I offer kudos to them, but thought it might be worth discussing some of the reasons why this is interesting, and a few new ideas.

Another road trip has meant fewer posts -- this trip included being in Paris on the night of Nov 13 but fortunately taking a train out a couple of hours before the shooting began, and I am now in South Africa on the way to Budapest -- but a few recent items merit some comment.

I'm pleased to announce today the unveiling of a new self-driving vehicle company with which I am involved,
not building self-driving cars, but instead small delivery robots which are going to change the face of
retailing and last-mile delivery and logistics.

In the buzz over the Tesla autopilot update, a lot of commentary has appeared comparing this Autopilot with Google's car effort and other efforts and what I would call a "real" robocar -- one that can operate unmanned or with a passenger paying no attention to the road. We've seen claims that "Tesla has beaten Google to the punch" and other similar errors. While the Tesla release is a worthwhile step forward, the two should not be confused as all that similar.

Last night, one day early, I attended Stanford's unveiling of their newest research vehicle for self-driving. In order to do experiments with drifting (where you let the rear wheels skid freely) they heavily modified an old Delorean.

They managed to get Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters to host the event so there was a good crowd. He asked "Why a Delorean?" and instead of saying the obvious line:

"The way I see it, if you're going to build a self-driving drifting car, why not do it with some style?"

During a very busy September of travel, I let a number of important stories fall through the cracks. The volume of mainstream press articles on Robocars is immense. Most are rehashes of things you have already seen here, but if you want the fastest breaking news, there are now some sources that focus on that. Here I will report the important news with analysis.

Last week, I commented on the VW scandal and asked the question we have all wondered, "what the hell were they thinking?" Elements of an answer are starting to arise, and they are very believable and teach us interesting lessons, if true. That's because things like this are rarely fully to blame on a small group of very evil people, but are more often the result of a broad situation that pushed ordinary (but unethical) people well over the ethical line. This we must understand because frankly, it can happen to almost anybody.

The ingredients, in this model are:

A hard driving culture of expected high performance, and doing what others thought was difficult or impossible.

Promising the company you will deliver a hotly needed product in that culture.

Realizing too late that you can't deliver it.

Panic, leading to cheating as the only solution in which you survive (at least for a while.)

There's no question that VW has a culture like that. Many successful companies do, some even attribute their excellence to it. Here's a quote from the 90s from VW's leader at the time, talking about his desire for a hot new car line, and what would happen if his team told him that they could not delivery it:

"Then I will tell them they are all fired and I will bring in a new team," Piech, the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, founder of both Porsche and Volkswagen, declared forcefully. "And if they tell me they can't do it, I will fire them, too."

Now we add a few more interesting ingredients, special to this case:

European emissions standards and tests are terrible, and allowed diesel to grow very strong in Europe, and strong for VW in particular

VW wanted to duplicate that success in the USA, which has much stronger emissions standards and tests

The team is asked to develop an engine that can deliver power and fuel economy for the US and other markets, and do it while meeting the emissions standards. The team (or its leader) says "yes," instead of saying, "That's really, really hard."

They get to work, and as has happened many times in many companies, they keep saying they are on track. Plans are made. Tons of new car models will depend on this engine. Massive marketing and production plans are made. Billions are bet.

And then it unravels

Not too many months before ship date, it is reported, the team working on the engine -- it is not yet known precisely who -- finally comes to a realization. They can't deliver. They certainly can't deliver on time, possibly they can actually never deliver for the price budget they have been given.

Now we see the situation in which ordinary people might be pushed over the line. If they don't deliver, the company has few choices. They might be able to put in a much more expensive engine, with all the cost such a switch would entail, and price their cars much more than they hoped, delivering them late. They could cancel all the many car models which were depending on this engine, costing billions. They could release a wimpy car that won't sell very well. In either of these cases, they are all fired, and their careers in the industry are probably over.

Or they can cheat and hope they won't get caught. They can be the heroes who delivered the magic engine, and get bonuses and rewards. 95% they don't get caught, and even if they are caught, it's worse, but not in their minds a lot worse than what they are facing. So they pretend they built the magic engine, and program it to fake that on the tests.

In Canada, there are 3 (and sometimes more) strong parties. This is true in much of the world; in fact the two-party USA is somewhat unusual. However, with "plurality" style elections, where the candidate with the most votes takes the seat even though they might have well under a majority, you can get a serious difference between the popular vote and the composition of the house. Americans see the same in their Electoral college and in gerrymandered districts.

The author, who wishes to defeat the incumbent Conservative party, proposes a way for the other two parties (Liberals and New Democrats) to join forces and avoid vote splitting. The Liberals and NDP are competitors, but have much more affinity for one another than they do for the Conservatives. They are both left-of-centre. This collaboration could be done at a national party level or at the grass roots level, though it would be much harder there.

Often in parliaments, you not only get splitting within the race for each seat, you get a house where no party has a majority. For minority governments, one party -- usually the largest -- strikes a deal with another party for a coalition that allows them to govern. Sometimes the coalition involves bitter enemies. They cooperate because the small party gets some concessions, and some of their agenda is passed into law, even though far more of the dominant party's agenda gets passed. Otherwise, the small party knows it will get nothing.

Among the most common questions I have seen in articles in the mainstream press, near the top is, "Who is going to be liable in a crash?" Writers always ask it but never answer it. I have often given the joking answer by changing the question to "Who gets sued?" and saying, "In the USA, that's easy. Everybody will get sued."

Yesterday I attended the "Silicon Valley reinvents the wheel" conference by the Western Automotive Journalists which had a variety of talks and demonstrations of new car technology.

Now that robocars have hit the top of the "Gartner Hype Cycle" for 2015, everybody is really piling on, hoping to see what's good for their industry due to the robocar. And of course, there is a great deal of good, but not for several industries.

Let me break down some potential misconceptions if my predictions are true:

Recently I did a road trip through Portugal. I always enjoy finding something new that they are doing in a country which has not yet spread to the rest of the world.

Along a number of Portuguese roads, you will see a sign marked "velocidade controlada" -- speed control -- and then a modest distance down the road will be a traffic light in the middle of nowhere. There is no cross street. This is an interesting alternative to the speed bump or other "traffic calming" systems.

Most of you would have heard about the giant scandal where it has been revealed that Volkswagen put software in their cars to deliberately cheat on emissions tests in the USA and possibly other places. It's very bad for VW, but what does it mean for all robocar efforts?

You can read tons about the Volkswagen emissions violations but here's a short summary. All modern cars have computer controlled fuel and combustion systems, and these can be tuned for different levels of performance, fuel economy and emissions. (Of course, ignition in a diesel is not done by an electronic spark.) Cars have to pass emission tests, so most cars have to tune their systems in ways that reduce other things (like engine performance and fuel economy) in order to reduce their pollution. Most cars attempt to detect the style of driving going on, and tune the engine differently for the best results in that situation.

VW went far beyond that. Apparently their system was designed to detect when it was in an emissions test. In these tests, the car is on rollers in a garage, and it follows certain patterns. VW set their diesel cars to look for this, and tune the engine to produce emissions below the permitted numbers. When the car saw it was in more regular driving situations, it switched the tuning to modes that gave it better performance and better mileage but in some cases vastly worse pollution. A commonly reported number is that in some modes 40 times the California limit of Nitrogen Oxides could be emitted, and even over a wide range of driving it was as high as 20 times the California limit (about 5 times the European limit.) NOx are a major smog component and bad for your lungs.

It has not been revealed just who at VW did this, and whether other car companies have done this as well. (All companies do variable tuning, and it's "normal" to have modestly higher emissions in real driving compared to the test, but this was beyond the pale.) The question everybody is asking is "What the hell were they thinking?"

That is indeed the question, because I think the central issue is why VW would do this. After all, having been caught, the cost is going to be immense, possibly even ruining one of the world's great brands. Obviously they did not really believe that they might get caught.

Beyond that, they have seriously reduced the trust that customers and governments will place not just in VW, but in car makers in general, and in their software offerings in particular. VW will lose trust, but this will spread to all German carmakers and possibly all carmakers. This could result in reduced trust in the software in robocars.

What the hell were they thinking?

The motive is the key thing we want to understand. In the broad sense, it's likely they did it because they felt customers would like it, and that would lead to selling more cars. At a secondary level, it's possible that those involved felt they would gain prestige (and compensation) if they pulled off the wizard's trick of making a diesel car which was clean and also high performance, at a level that turns out to be impossible.

Much press has been made over Jonathan Petit's recent disclosure of
an attack on some LIDAR systems used in robocars. I saw Petit's presentation
on this in July, but he asked me for confidentiality until they released their
paper in October. However, since he has decided to disclose it, there's
been a lot of press, with truth and misconceptions.

There are many security aspects to robocars. By far the greatest concern
would be compromise of the control computers by malicious software, and great
efforts will be taken to prevent that. Many of those efforts will involve
having the cars not talk to any untrusted sources of code or data which
might be malicious. The car's sensors, however, must take in information
from outside the vehicle, so they are another source of compromise.

There are ways to compromise many of the sensors on a robocar. GPS can be
easily spoofed, and there are tools out there to do that now. (Fortunately
real robocars will only use GPS as one clue to their location.) Radar is
also very easy to spooof -- far easier than LIDAR, agrees Petit -- but
their goal was to see if LIDAR is vulnerable.

The attack is a real one, but at the same time it's not, in spite of the
press, a particularly frightening one. It may cause a well designed
vehicle to believe there are "ghost" objects that don't actually exist, so that
it might brake for something that's not there, or even swerve around it.
It might also overwhelm the sensor, so that it feels the sensor has failed,
and thus the car would go into a failure mode, stopping or pulling off the
road. This is not a good thing, of course, and it has some safety
consequences, but it's also a fairly unlikely attack. Essentially, there
are far easier ways to do these things that don't involve the LIDAR, so it's
not too likely anybody would want to mount such an attack.

Indeed, to do these attacks, you need to be physically present, near the target car, and you need a solid
object that's already in front of the car, such as the back of a truck that
it's following. (It is possible the road surface might work.) This is a higher bar than attacks which might be done
remotely (such as computer intrusions) or via radio signals (such as with
hypothetical vehicle-to-vehicle radio, should cars decide to use that tech.)

Here's how it works: LIDAR works by sending out a very short pulse of laser
light, and then waiting for the light to reflect back. The pulse is a small
dot, and the reflection is seen through a lens aimed tightly at the place the
pulse was sent. The time it takes for the light to come back tells you how
far away the target is, and the brightness tells you how reflective it is,
like a black-and-white photo.

To fool a lidar, you must send another pulse that comes from or appears to come
from the target spot, and it has to come in at just the right time, before (or on some, after)
the real pulse from what's really in front of the LIDAR comes in.

The attack requires knowing the characteristics of the target LIDAR very
well. You must know exactly when it is going to send its pulses before it
sends them, and thus precisely (to the nanosecond) when a return reflection
("return") would arrive from a hypothetical object in front of the LIDAR. Many LIDARS
are quite predictable. They scan a scene with a rotating drum, and you can
see the pulses coming out, and know when they will be sent.